When documents are created, many decisions must be made as to style, content, layout, and the like. The text, images, and graphics must be organized and laid out in a two-dimensional format with the intention of providing a presentation to the viewer which will capture and preferably maintain their attention for the time sufficient to get the intended message across. Different style options are available for the various content elements and choices must be made. The best choices for style and layout depend upon content, intent, viewer interests, etc. In order to tell if a set of choices made as to the look and feel of the final version of the document were good or bad, one might request feedback from a set of viewers after viewing the document and compile the feedback into something meaningful from which the document's creators or developers can make alterations, changes, or other improvements. This cycle repeats until the document's owners are satisfied that the final version achieves the intended result.
This is method of designing a document may work well with a single, non-variable, document, but not it can be very labor intensive and/or time consuming to utilize such a process on a variable information documents.
Variable Information documents are documents that are personalized or tailored in some way to the particular user of the document. In traditional variable information applications, a graphic artist creates a template for the document, which describes the overall layout for the content items, the holes into which the variable content should be placed, and rules for how to fill in the variable slots with the content, or links to particular fields in a database. The variable data application then creates a document for each customer by inserting the data for the customer into its linked slot. The resulting set of documents can contain instances which don't work well with the designed template's desired quality and/or effectiveness.
Factors that contribute to the quality and effectiveness of a document are the document's layout and style. Conventionally, these factors have been measured using subjective measures, thereby adding to the labor and time needed to fully evaluate a document.
This may not be a significant problem when evaluating a production run of a non-variable content document because an evaluator needs only to look at a sample or proof to make a determination if the non-variable content documents, generated by the production run, will have the desired quality and effectiveness. However, if the need is to evaluate a production run of variable content documents, an evaluator would need to look at all the variable content documents on an individual basis because although each document may have started with a common template, the inclusion of the variable content into the documents makes each document unique. By requiring an evaluator to review each individual document to determine effectiveness and quality, one could not ever have an effective quality control process with respect to production runs of variable content documents.
Therefore, it is desirable to measure a variable-content document's effectiveness and quality without relying upon an evaluator subjective evaluation. Moreover, it is desirable to provide a methodology to measure the quality of a variable-content document in a quantifiable way. It is also desirable to provide a quantifiable measurement of quality which is useable in evaluating a run of variable-content documents and making individual document time-effective decisions as whether a particular variable-content document of a run of variable-content documents meets the desired effectiveness and quality criteria.
A method for automatically identifying an unacceptable variable content document within a set of variable content documents generates a set of variable content documents using a pre-designed template having a desired layout and quality; measures a predetermined set of characteristics for each variable content document within the set of variable content documents; quantizes the measured predetermined set of characteristics for each variable content document within the set of variable content documents; generates a quantized quality score for each variable content document within the set of variable content documents; and identifies a variable content document as having an unacceptable quality when the quantized quality score of the variable content document is outside a predetermined range of values.
A method for automatically identifying an unacceptable variable content document within a set of variable content documents generates a set of variable content documents using a pre-designed template having a desired layout and quality; measures a predetermined set of characteristics for each variable content document within the set of variable content documents; quantizes the measured predetermined set of characteristics for each variable content document within the set of variable content documents; generates a quantized quality score for each variable content document within the set of variable content documents; and identifies a variable content document as having an unacceptable quality when the quantized quality score of the variable content document is statistically different from other quantized quality scores of the set of variable content documents.
A method for automatically identifying an unacceptable template to be used in creating a set of variable content documents generates a template to generate a set of variable content documents having a desired layout and quality; generates a set of variable content documents using the generated template and a pre-determined database; measures a predetermined set of characteristics for each variable content document within the set of variable content documents; quantizes the measured predetermined set of characteristics for each variable content document within the set of variable content documents; generates a quantized quality score for each variable content document within the set of variable content documents; identifies a variable content document having a worst unacceptable quality based upon the quantized quality scores; modifies the generated template; re-generates the variable content document having a worst unacceptable quality using the modified template; and determines if the re-generated variable content document has an acceptable quality.